Editorial | August 19, 2026

The government wants to make agriculture more remunerative. But it appears to have little idea of why rural workers, particularly the younger generation are moving away from farming, or whether some of those who left are now returning.

That contradiction deserves greater scrutiny.

In a written reply to the Lok Sabha in the recently concluded monsoon session, Minister of State for Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Ramnath Thakur admitted that the Centre has not conducted any study to assess the migration of rural youth away from agriculture. The admission came in response to a question by Congress MP Dr M. K. Vishnu Prasad, who had raised concerns over the migration of rural youth from agriculture because of low profitability and declining farm incomes.

The government instead cited data from the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), which shows that the proportion of workers engaged in agriculture in rural areas declined from 59.5% in 2023 to 58.9% in 2024 and 57.2% in 2025.

These figures, by themselves, do not establish that rural youth are migrating away from agriculture. But they certainly raise an important question: why is the share of rural workers engaged in agriculture declining?

The government does not appear to have an answer backed by systematic data.

This is not a minor statistical gap. If agriculture is to remain a viable livelihood for the next generation, policymakers need to know whether young people are leaving because farming is insufficiently profitable, because non-farm employment is more attractive, because of rising input costs, indebtedness, fragmented landholdings, climate risks, or a combination of these factors.

Without such information, policy risks becoming a matter of assumption rather than evidence.

More troubling is the government’s reliance on old income data while discussing the present economic viability of agriculture.

In response to the question on farm incomes, the minister cited the National Sample Survey’s 77th round, conducted in 2019. According to the survey, the average monthly income of an agricultural household increased from Rs 6,426 in 2012-13 to Rs 10,218 in 2018-19.

That is useful historical information. But it is not a picture of the current state of farm incomes.

The government has not provided a comparable nationwide figure for agricultural household income after 2018-19 in the reply. Consequently, there is no updated figure here with which to assess whether agricultural household incomes have kept pace with inflation, input costs, wages, land-related expenses and the broader cost of living.

A government that repeatedly speaks of making agriculture “more remunerative” should be able to demonstrate that claim with current data.

There is another striking gap.

When Samajwadi Party MPs Neeraj Maurya, Babu Singh Kushwaha and Lalji Verma asked whether workers who had earlier migrated from rural India were returning to agriculture because of limited employment opportunities outside the sector, the minister said the government does not maintain data on reverse migration to agriculture.

Nor, he said, does it maintain data on the extent to which any increase in the agricultural workforce can specifically be attributed to reverse migration.

Again, the issue is not that every aspect of migration can be captured perfectly through a single survey. The problem is the absence of a clear attempt to build a comprehensive evidence base around a transformation that is central to rural India’s economic future.

The government points out, correctly, that agriculture is a State subject and that the Centre supports States through policy measures, budgetary assistance and various schemes intended to improve farmers’ welfare and make agriculture more remunerative.

But responsibility for agricultural policy does not eliminate the need for national-level data.

In fact, the opposite is true. If the Centre wants to claim that its policies are making farming more attractive and profitable, it needs credible indicators to measure the outcome.

The latest figures cited by the minister show that agriculture’s share of the overall workforce, covering both rural and urban areas, fell from 46.1% in 2023 to 44.8% in 2024 and 43% in 2025. Again, these numbers cannot tell us whether people are leaving farming voluntarily, being pushed out by economic pressures, moving into better-paying occupations, or returning temporarily to agriculture when other employment opportunities disappear.

That distinction matters enormously.

A shrinking agricultural workforce could be a sign of economic transformation if workers are moving into productive, better-paying jobs. But it could also reflect distress if farming households are abandoning agriculture because they cannot earn a sustainable livelihood from it. The two situations demand very different policy responses.

This is why data matters.

The government cannot simultaneously argue that agriculture is becoming more remunerative and remain unable or unwilling to provide sufficiently recent data on farm household incomes, youth participation, migration and reverse migration.

India needs a much more systematic approach to measuring the economics of farming. Regular estimates of agricultural household income should be accompanied by data on cultivation costs, profitability, indebtedness, landholding size, age of farmers and movement of workers between agriculture and non-farm employment.

Most importantly, the country needs to know whether young people see farming as a viable profession, or merely as an occupation they inherit until another opportunity emerges.

The question is therefore bigger than whether the agricultural workforce is rising or falling.

It is whether agriculture can offer India’s rural youth a future worth choosing.

And if the government does not collect the data needed to answer that question, it should be cautious about claiming that it already knows the answer.
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